STS

• Technology


  Means to an end / purposeful / functional: having a purpose, end, or value for which it is intended or used
• Technology


  Most generally: intended and used to increase freedom and power
• Children of Invention


  • Technology creates new opportunities for human flourishing and new ways of life, which in turn create new social and ethical problems
• Scope of Technology


  • End-product: artifacts
  • Tools: machines and processes
  • Agents: scientists, engineers and technicians
  • Social support: purposeful organization
• Technological systems


  • Consist of: Human activity form: techniques and practices
  • Resources, tools & materials
  • Artifacts
  • Ends/ functions/ valences
  • Background knowledge and skills
  • Social organization
• Technological Revolutions


  • Hunter-gatherer societies: Shelter
  • Hunting
  • Gathering
  • Cooking
  • Transportation
  • Defense
• Agricultural Revolution


  • Allowed settled, communities (civilization)
  • More food, so greater population density
  • Greater population density allowed for coordinated efforts and specialized skills
  • No need for portability
  • More work to maintain higher, more complex standard of living
  • Emergence of morality, law, religion, records, mathematics, astronomy, class structures, patriarchy
• Industrial Revolution


  • Steam engine, then gasoline-driven combustion engine
  • More specialized division of labour and of knowledge — each worker needed fewer skills
  • Less expensive goods, so increased standard of living
  • Infrastructure for transportation
• Ned Ludd


  Perhaps fictional man who destroyed two large stocking-frames that produced inexpensive stockings undercutting those produced by skilled knitters. Because he was feeble-minded, he was not prosecuted.
• Luddites: Opposition may not have been to technological change, but to the free market; luddites wanted to protect their skills and livelihoods
• NOW: "luddite" and "luddism" refer to anyone who opposes industrial technology, or technology more generally
• Knowledge Revolution


  • Better record keeping and communication
  • Flexible, programmable tools allow more customized short production runs, so supply can more accurately follow demand
  • Better scheduling and inventory control provides basis for geographically distributed production systems (globalization)
  • Increased need for specialized education
• Kaczynski: 3 possibilities


  • Humans might drift into dependence on machines where they have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions
  • A tiny elite will eliminate the rest of humanity
  • A tiny elite will engineer a purposeless and therefore harmless humanity, like domesticated animals
• Ray Kurzweil: New jobs are on a higher level and increasingly involved with education
• Ray Kurzweil: Need a viable alternative to the nightmare envisioned by luddites such as Kaczynski
• Ray Kurzweil: Can't drop technology:"there is too little nature left to return to"
• Ray Kurzweil: Education will reach a human limit, but will be human competence will be extended by merging with the technology
• Evaluating Technology


  • Epistemology: Technology & Science
  • Aesthetics: Technology & Beauty
  • Ethics: Technology and Morality
• Traditional View: Science = pure, value-free pursuit of knowledge; Technology = matter of arts and crafts
• Modern/Enlightenment View: Empirical investigation as a means to knowledge, aided by technology; Development of technology aided by scientific education
• Improved standards of living can include more leisure time, better access to recreation and pleasant experiences
• Greater ease of performing tasks itself is a type of beauty
• 4 kinds of ethical concerns arising from technology

  • Whether and how new technologies should be used (esp. medical)
  • Aggregate responsibility (e.g. pollution, depletion of resources)
  • Distributive justice: certain groups alone may be advantaged
  • Changing relationship to nature and other animals
• 5 characteristics of technological dangers

  • Result of aggregate action
  • Not direct harms, but increased risks that are hard to detect
  • Impact far into the future
  • Affect not only humans but other forms of life and the environment
  • Affect no particular communities, but all of humanity
• The Essence of Technology

  Technology can be viewed as a means to an end (instrumental) or as human activity (anthropological), but neither touches the essence of technology
• Causality


  Technology brings about change causally, where the cause is responsible for the effect and the effect is indebted to the cause
• Bringing Forth


  The bringing forth which underlies causality is a bringing out of concealment, which the Greeks call truth. Technology brings forth as well, and it is a revealing.
• Modern Technology


  The revealing of modern technology is not a bringing-forth, but a challenging-forth. It challenges nature, by extracting something from it and transforming it, storing it up, distributing it, etc.
• The Standing-Reserve


  Modern technology takes all of nature to stand in reserve for its exploitation. Man becomes the instrument of technology, to be exploited in the ordering of nature.
• Enframing


  It is not man that orders nature through technology, but a more basic process of revealing. The challenge of this revealing is called "enframing".
• Destining


  Men are sent upon the way of revealing the actual as a standing-reserve. So enframing, and hence technology, is a "destining".
• The Danger


  The real threat of technology comes from its essence, not its activities or products. Man is in danger of becoming merely part of the standing-reserve.
• The Saving Power


  Poetry and other arts have the power to reveal, in the sense of "bringing-forth", which may be the best means for getting at the essence of technology itself.
• Even the wind can be set upon, with great birds of prey, 1000s and 1000s of them, who cannot see the churning vanes accumulate around the circumference of such wind-farms (USA Today 25/1/2004)
• The Mostar Bridge was rebuilt as a tourist attraction after being destroyed in 1993
• Setting Upon


  The challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing (this would be nature) in the mode or guise of so much "standing reserve"
• An area is en-framed
• Friedrich Hölderlin: 'But where danger is, grows The saving power also.'
• The essence of technology is nothing technological